The Clock on a Bad Agreement Runs About Five Years

Oslo and Minsk both bought time. The Gaza roadmap is assembled from the same parts.

On 31 August 2015, three Ukrainian National Guardsmen died outside parliament in Kyiv. Ihor Derbin was 25. Oleksandr Kostyn was 20. Neither was killed at the front.

They died over a first reading. The Rada was voting on a constitutional amendment granting special status to Donetsk and Luhansk, a clause Minsk II obliged Ukraine to write into its own constitution. Ukraine’s negotiators had accepted that clause six months earlier, with the president in the room, while the Debaltseve pocket was closing around several thousand of their own soldiers.

It did not save Debaltseve. Minsk II was signed on 12 February 2015. The ceasefire took effect on the 15th. Debaltseve fell on the 18th.

The amendment passed its first reading and was never adopted. It could not be. No Ukrainian government was going to write a veto for Donetsk into the constitution and survive Kyiv, and anyone who had spent a week in Kyiv that year knew it. It was signed anyway, under pressure, to stop a battle it did not stop. Then the failure to deliver it became the grievance the other side needed for the next seven years.

Count the intervals. Oslo II, September 1995. The Second Intifada, September 2000. Five years. Minsk II, February 2015. Full-scale invasion, February 2022. Seven.

I have been on the receiving end of both clocks. In September 2000 I was at a yeshiva in Kiryat Arba when the shooting started from the hills above it. In 2002 I went into Jenin with Golani. Some of the gunmen we fought there drew salaries from a security apparatus Oslo had built and armed. In February 2015 I was in the Donbas. In 2022 I was near Bucha.

The Board of Peace published its 15-point roadmap on 30 July. I set it beside Trump’s 20-point plan. Three places matter.

Point 13 of the original required military infrastructure to be destroyed and not rebuilt, with weapons placed permanently beyond use. Article 8 of the roadmap substitutes a process to decommission and store. Storage is a location. Destruction is a fact.

Article 7 handles the police. Personnel who fail vetting are offered alternative civilian roles or retirement, and the text specifies that none of them may be deprived of their financial entitlements, particularly on grounds of political affiliation. Failing the screen carries no consequence. Newly trained officers are folded into the existing structures rather than replacing them. This is the mechanism that produced the men I met in Jenin, written down in advance.

Article 12 bars the International Stabilization Force from performing any policing mission. Article 14 assigns internal security incidents to the new Palestinian administrative committee. Read together, the roadmap designates no body whose job is to take a weapon out of an unwilling hand.

Then the question of who certifies that any of this has happened.

Article 2 constitutes the verification committee from the guarantors, the Board of Peace and the stabilization force. The guarantors are the four signatories of the Sharm el-Sheikh declaration of 13 October 2025: the United States, Egypt, Qatar and Turkey. Israel did not attend that ceremony and did not sign it.

So the body that will certify whether Hamas has disarmed seats Hamas’s principal patrons, and does not seat the state whose own compliance it will also be judging. The roadmap sets out no voting rule, no quorum, and no consequence if the committee declines to certify a violation.

That committee does not exist yet. It is to be established by the Board of Peace. Its membership and its decision rules are being settled right now. This is the window.

None of this means agreements fail. Egypt 1979 and Jordan 1994 have held for decades. They did not hold because anyone was watching. In May 1967 Nasser told the UN Emergency Force to leave Sinai and it left, and the war came within weeks. Since 2006 UNIFIL has stood in southern Lebanon under a Security Council resolution instructing that Hezbollah not rearm there, and Hezbollah rearmed there. Monitors record. Prevention was never in the mandate.

Egypt and Jordan hold because each is a state that tried war, lost, and has a return address for the consequences of trying again. Deterrence works on something that can be punished. Hamas has no return address, and the roadmap’s answer to that is a committee.

Israel has a habit its adversaries do not share: it implements what it signs. Sinai, Lebanon in 2000, Gaza in 2005. That record is an asset in every negotiation and a liability in exactly one case: when the text is bad. A document binds the side that keeps documents.

The obvious objection is the West Bank after 2007, where Palestinian security forces did suppress Hamas infrastructure for years. They did it while the IDF operated in Area A almost every night. It worked because Israeli freedom of action was never removed. The roadmap is built to remove it.

Israel’s public objection so far has been about sequencing: no withdrawal from the yellow line before genuine disarmament. That is the right instinct pointed at the wrong clause. Sequencing gets renegotiated at every stage of a process like this one. What does not get renegotiated is a standing limit on when Israel may act, and the identity of the people who will rule on whether it was entitled to.

Bad agreements do not soften with time. They compound. Debaltseve was a pocket. Seven years later it was a country.

The same argument is now running on the Iranian file, where the choice is again between a document and a capability.